Yadong Sun,1 Yanjie Shan,1 Jiaqiong Xie,1 Ke Chen,1 Jia Hu2 

1Faculty of Social Sciences, Chongqing University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 2Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China

Correspondence: Ke Chen; Jia Hu, Chongqing University, Shapingba, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China, 400044, Tel +86-13628362626, Email chenke197729@163.com; hujia827@cqu.edu.cn

Purpose: With the development of information technology and various social media, recommendation algorithms have increasingly more influence on users’ social media usage. To date, there has been limited research focused on analyzing the impact of recommendation algorithms on social media use and their corresponding role in the development of problematic behaviors. The present study analyzes the impact of recommendation algorithms on college students’ information sharing and internalizing, externalizing problem behaviors to address the aforementioned shortcomings.
Methods: An online questionnaire survey was conducted among 34,752 college students in China. A latent profile analysis was conducted to explore the various behavioral patterns of Chinese college students’ information sharing across the three social media platforms identified for this study. The Bolck–Croon–Hagenaars (BCH) method Regression Mixture Modeling was then used to analyze the differences in internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors among the different subgroups of Chinese college students.
Results: The level of information sharing by college students across different social media platforms could be divided into “WeChat Moments low-frequency information sharing”, “middle-frequency comprehensive information sharing”, “TikTok high-frequency information sharing”, and “Sina Weibo high-frequency information sharing”. Significant differences were observed regarding internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors among college students in different information-sharing subgroups.
Conclusion: This study identified four subgroups with different information-sharing characteristics using latent profile analysis. Among them, college students who are in subgroup of social media information sharing influenced by recommendation algorithms exhibit higher frequency of information sharing and higher level of internalizing and externalizing problematic behaviors. These results expand our understanding of college students’ social media usage and problem behaviors from a technological perspective. In future, the negative impacts of recommendation algorithms on college students can be reduced by improving their awareness of these algorithms and optimizing the algorithms themselves.

Keywords: user-generated content, recommendation algorithms, latent profile analysis, internalizing problem behaviors, externalizing problem behaviors